Google Trends for "Free-to-air"

[KE4EST]

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=/m/03bl54

 

[Titanium]

Interesting chart, KE4EST! Easy to see when theft of service against Dish Network peaked and then the transition to new encryption and modulations!

Takes the guess work out of trying to figure out what drove the "FTA" market during he past 10 years. Be interesting to compare to the number of "FTA" resellers during that same time frame.

 

[KE4EST]

I was thinking the same on the number of resellers.

 

[Wescopc]

Very interesting 1/8 the number of inquiries in November from 7 years ago! Now if we could only know how many "FTAers" there really are.
Bob

 

[Cosmo Blatz]

Thanks for the link KE4EST.
Most of the inquiries are not from the U.S. Looks like the African Continent has the most Googles. FTA interest in the US is just slightly above zip, if I'm reading the data correctly.

 

[KE4EST]

Good point this, link may be more useful to us.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=/m/03bl54&geo=US&cmpt=q

 

[Radioguy41]

It's a little bit misleading in that the chart only reflects one term - free-to-air. If you click on the link and look at all the terms like fta, free fta, fta receiver, etc it adds up to a bit more. Still trending down, however, although there are indications it's leveling off which is usually the case with anything new. People jump on board then gradually loose interest until only the hardcore remain, especially as they become aware it's not a simple plug-and-play technology. We be the hardcore bunch.

 

[Titanium]

Jeepguy, Good points! The spike had little to do with interest in the hobby and awareness of true free to air. It was 99.9% for the misuse of the term FTA to define the hardware used for theft of service.

 

[FaT Air]

Yeah, I'd bet that the great majority 'searching' those terms in the past were only interested in the 'dark side''.
We, on the other hand, need to search no more. We're here at home.

 

[Nov-01]

Dumb ol' me looked at that graph and thought, "well, that makes plenty of sense; it spiked during the recession and peeps were looking to save funds"
If you were to invert the graph (make spike downward) it would reflect our business trends (again recession)

 

[V_H]

Jeepguy, Good points! The spike had little to do with interest in the hobby and awareness of true free to air. It was 99.9% for the misuse of the term FTA to define the hardware used for theft of service.

Many people also uses FTA when referring to OTA TV.

Regulars here are hobbyists but don't forget that most FTA users are consumers. To get ethnic or religious channels, they hire an installer or search the internet for instructions to set it up once and not think about it as long as stay working.

I think the tapering has more to do with the "Digital Transition" of OTA TV and the wide availability of broadband. More stations are streaming on the Internet now. When I set up my 1st satellite dish for my parent on Christmas 1999 to get 1 Vietnamese channel (with only 8 hours of programming daily and had to use a series 1 Tivo to time-shift) and was happy to get that because there is no local Vietnamese channels. Today Houston has 5 or 6 local Vietnamese channels and there is much less need for satellite. Ethnic and religious channels seems to out number mainstream channels. People who uses satellite for Hispanic channels can get more over the air now than they can get on sat.

When the Polish channels on 97W got scrambles, a coworker switched over to an online DVR/on-demand streaming service. When I told him that the channels are now unscrambled, he has no interest in switching back. I've notice an increase popularity of "Chinese TV Box". I think these are XBMC or Android boxes preinstalled with hundreds of Chinese channels and probably proxy service to get around region lock. If I just start now, I would probably go with streaming rather than FTA.